This brand-new release is one of the best statements I have ever heard — EVER HEARD — on the essence of meditation, its “purpose” and ontological truth. Less than 10 minutes, it is the clearest, most intrinsically emphatic “call to action” for meditation from one of the world’s greatest living teachers of the nature of consciousness. His books — among them especially The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and Free Will — have had major impacts on my life: as much as providing any new information, it felt like meeting someone speaking many truths I had already

Socrates did not only teach in the high temples and academies of ancient Athens. He also debated in the noisy, chaotic marketplaces and open spaces of the teeming city: in the “agora,” filled with deal-making and shouts, with hard bargaining and the sour stench of animal piss, where fights could break out at a moment’s notice, where a group who disagreed with your point of view could mete out retributive justice for your philosophical challenge to them to “look deeper.” In the same way, we cannot only teach Zen in the clean temples and Zen centers of the world. Social

A precious snippet of film documenting a tram ride through Vienna in the days that Mahler walked there, in 1906, on the streets that he walked, in the very neighborhood where he worked — it literally begins with the building where he was working — the Wiener Hofoper, the Vienna Court Opera, now the Vienna State Opera — in the very days he would have been working there. In the very hours of his being in the building. (Glad there is no day and month on this film — I am just the kind of person who would run back

One of my favorites of the recent collaboration with the Greek artist, Christina Biliouri. This is just the beginning, and there are so many more to come. This is becoming such an interesting project: Having been urged by some of our young local members of the Zen Center Regensburg to put some posts on Instagram which would advertise the Center by sharing teachings, I reached into something which would marry her uncommon eye and some of the great Zen star-teachings which fill the spectrum of my intellectual firmament — and many of the notables are not monks, or Zen masters,